04 March 2010

My sister's kid had a birthday recently, and because they live a good two hours away, the girlie and I spent the night. Some bed sharing and shuffling meant that the girlie slept with her cousin, and I got a night to myself - in a single bed, but alone, and no one woke me up. It was kind of heavenly.

While I was lying there in the morning, I was thinking about the curtains in the room. My mother made them back when my sister was pregnant with her first child - pale yellow plaid (harvested from a set of sheets), with a border trim of multicolored 1" patchwork squares. After we moved into our house, my mother made curtains for my daughter's room - white with tiny blue polka dots (Ruth Bogen's sheets), trimmed with a 1" strip of blue flowered calico.

I realized that I was kind of writing a blog post in my head - the curtains, my mother, the babies - and I remembered that David Pogue had written about an iPhone dictation app. So I downloaded Dragon then and there, and tried it out, rambling on about the curtains.

Oh yeah.

Online at Macy's we can relate to this history test I created his industry can usually tell trophies the floor focused on the couldn't make it

That's what I said about the curtains, sure.

I think I was speaking in some uncaffeinated, throaty morning voice, because I've tried Dragon again and had it work stunningly well. But that first try? Wow.

I've seen some great results with speech-to-text, but also some paragraphs that made the Macy's trophy story look like the picture of accuracy. At least there was nothing obscene in its mistranslation!

Anyway, I like this meta blog post about how you were going to post about the curtains and the process getting there! Also, I'm jealous of your possession of both iphone and dragon. But I'd love to see more Dragon text when it works as you use it to compose---if you want to add that in the future as an appendix to your blog post!

Inevitably, the idea for a post - and the language that will bring it alive - comes to me when I am in motion. Walking home from walking the kids to school, or on my way to pilates, or heading out for errands. I use the iPhone Voice Memos app, just so I can grab the words before they escape and my feeble memory lets them get too far away to be recalled. But then I have to transcribe it. I think I want to try your friendly Dragon. You recommend it?

About Me

It's a journal, a scrapbook, a record of my kid's childhood. It's about food, it's about the pleasures of gardening. It's where I wear my heart on my sleeve, play with words and rail at the world. It's where I muse, and where I indulge my inner magpie. I have one irascible child, and not enough time to read.
If you'd like, you can email me at magpiemusing AT gmail DOT com.